Vocal Imitations of Non-Vocal Sounds

Lemaître, Guillaume; Houix, Olivier; Voisin, Frédéric; Misdariis, Nicolas; Susini, Patrick

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0168167

Cited by 28 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 74 publications

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“…Accumulating evidence shows that iconic words are prevalent across the spoken languages of the world [23,24,30]. Counter to past assumptions about the limitations of human vocal imitation, people are surprisingly effective at using vocal imitation to represent and communicate about the sounds in their environment [33] and more abstract meanings [31]. These findings raise the possibility that early spoken words originated from vocal imitations, perhaps comparable to the way that many of the signs of signed languages appear to be formed originally from pantomimes [31,40].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repeated imitation makes human vocalizations more word-like

2018

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People have long pondered the evolution of language and the origin of words. Here, we investigate how conventional spoken words might emerge from imitations of environmental sounds. Does the repeated imitation of an environmental sound gradually give rise to more word-like forms? In what ways do these forms resemble the original sounds that motivated them (i.e. exhibit iconicity)? Participants played a version of the children's game 'Telephone'. The first generation of participants imitated recognizable environmental sounds (e.g. glass breaking, water splashing). Subsequent generations imitated the previous generation of imitations for a maximum of eight generations. The results showed that the imitations became more stable and word-like, and later imitations were easier to learn as category labels. At the same time, even after eight generations, both spoken imitations and their written transcriptions could be matched above chance to the category of environmental sound that motivated them. These results show how repeated imitation can create progressively more word-like forms while continuing to retain a resemblance to the original sound that motivated them, and speak to the possible role of human vocal imitation in explaining the origins of at least some spoken words.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repeated imitation makes human vocalizations more word-like

2018

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“…Imitative (or "iconic") words are found across the spoken languages of the world (Dingemanse et al, 2015;Imai & Kita, 2014;Perniss et al, 2010). Counter to past assumptions about the limitations of human vocal imitation, people are surprisingly effective at using vocal imitation to represent and communicate about the sounds in their environment (Lemaitre et al, 2016) and more abstract meanings , making the hypothesis that early spoken words originated from imitations a plausible one. We examined whether simply repeating an imitation of an environmental sound-with no intention to create a new word or even to communicate-produces more word-like forms.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repeated imitation makes human vocalizations more word-like

Edmiston

Lupyan

Perlman

2017

Preprint

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People have long pondered the evolution of language and the origin of words. Here, we investigate how conventional spoken words might emerge from imitations of environmental sounds. Does the repeated imitation of an environmental sound gradually give rise to more word-like forms? In what ways do these forms resemble the original sounds that motivated them (i.e., exhibit iconicity)? Participants played a version of the children’s game “Telephone”. The first generation of participants imitated recognizable environmental sounds (e.g., glass breaking, water splashing). Subsequent generations imitated the previous generation of imitations for a maximum of 8 generations. The results showed that the imitations became more stable and word-like, and later imitations were easier to learn as category labels. At the same time, even after 8 generations, both spoken imitations and their written transcriptions could be matched above chance to the category of environmental sound that motivated them. These results show how repeated imitation can create progressively more word-like forms while continuing to retain a resemblance to the original sound that motivated them, and speak to the possible role of human vocal imitation in explaining the origins of at least some spoken words.

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“…Some of the mentioned work target user-specific vocal percussion analysis rather than general methods that could work for everyone, as vocal imitation styles seem to change significantly from person to person [9] [19]. Nevertheless, the idea of a universal model for vocal percussion classification may also be plausible, as some studies have suggested that humans, when given the task of imitating non-vocal environmental sounds, naturally give realism to these imitations by focusing on certain characteristic perceptual features of the original sound queries [14].…”

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Dataset for Amateur Vocal Percussion Analysis

Delgado

McDonald

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 14th International Audio Mostly Conference: A Journey in Sound

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The imitation of percussive instruments via the human voice is a natural way for us to communicate rhythmic ideas and, for this reason, it attracts the interest of music makers. Specifically, the automatic mapping of these vocal imitations to their emulated instruments would allow creators to realistically prototype rhythms in a faster way. The contribution of this study is twofold. Firstly, a new Amateur Vocal Percussion (AVP) dataset is introduced to investigate how people with little or no experience in beatboxing approach the task of vocal percussion. The end-goal of this analysis is that of helping mapping algorithms to better generalise between subjects and achieve higher performances. The dataset comprises a total of 9780 utterances recorded by 28 participants with fully annotated onsets and labels (kick drum, snare drum, closed hi-hat and opened hi-hat). Lastly, we conducted baseline experiments on audio onset detection with the recorded dataset, comparing the performance of four state-of-the-art algorithms in a vocal percussion context.

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Vocal Imitations of Non-Vocal Sounds

Cited by 28 publications

References 74 publications

Repeated imitation makes human vocalizations more word-like

Repeated imitation makes human vocalizations more word-like

Repeated imitation makes human vocalizations more word-like

A New Dataset for Amateur Vocal Percussion Analysis

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